Hey folks. I get a lot of messages from people who don't get how this technique helps speed up render times. Please watch the whole video as I explain it at least twice, with the caveat that it wont work in every situation. I hope that helps :)
It's brilliant .....No wonder why daz take our money for a silly Hdr images - this is a lot easier and it definitely save a lot of rendering time.......! Many million thanks
Wow... Really amazing idea. I never thought about doing it this way but it makes so much sense!!! It seems like it would work really well for those closeup shots with the blurred backgrounds from DOF. I have a coffee shop scene I'm working on now and I have a lot of shots to do of people talking to each other at a table and I think this would be perfect to speed up all those renders!
Fantastic tip, I'm working on a comic with some large complex interior scenes and this will massively speed up my workflow for all the parts where it just needs to be background whilst characters are speaking! EDIT: FWIW this is easily do-able in GIMP for those who have been asking about alternatives to photoshop
@@TenebrisInvictusI used a great tutorial titled "HDR Photos With the GIMP" on instructables dot com that taught me how to do it - just search for "hdr gimp instructables" and you should find it (not sure UA-cam likes direct linking to external sources in comments otherwise I'd post a direct link here)
Dude! I love all your tutorials but, this one wow! This is sooooooooooooo amazing! Once one can grasp the potential of this technique and how many calculations are being avoided in the render. Plus I love the blurred background, it is more stylish and helps the eye to focus on the model in the first plane. Thank you very very much indeed!
Brilliant making yourself an hdri to lesson the geometry calculations. I have a city scene that has way too much render time. This could help a tonne. Every video has great tips and tricks. Thanks.
Thank you! Going to try doing this also as I have an older Gtx 970 with only 4GB of ram so most large scenes run out of memory and try to use the cpu. Excited to use some of my Stonemason props lol 🙂
I started using Daz studio recently, started as a photographer many years ago and now discovered that this software is awesome to create your own visions without finding the right place and model as you simply just create it. After my first ok-ish results I found your channel and this helped me big time speeding up the learning curve. After watching this video, I ask myself how you would deal with artificial lighting in your scenery. Imagine you have an indoor scene, 4 artificial light sources which light a model. Would you create an HDR with all artificial lights and simply hide the model, or would you just use the background scenery with no lights and then insert model + artificial light sources in a second shot using the HDR as dome on top? Keep up your amazing work, it is a pleasure to watch and follow! Thanks!!
One of my later videos explains how to use canvases to create impossible lighting in a scene. I also have a video about creating your own HDRi's for different lighting setups
Thanks, gonna try this later :) I usually drop the images into blender and render it again with the Intel denoiser, but now I can go a few sames higher I guess :D
@@GameDeveloperTraining will that still save time? compared to rendering it as whole? I just need decent clear1080p quality images with no issues like noise etc. And just like you I need to churn out lots of renders
Wow, great info, thanks! I see you have your environment value set pretty high - 7.0. Did you just play with it to get it right or was there a reason you used that value?
I was hoping this would help out my poor little GTX 1660Ti, but the single spherical map I rendered took 6-7 hours at 1080p. I'm not sure because my log file keeps crashing, joy. This was also while using Scene Optimizer to reduce every single map size, using the Denoiser to try and speed up the render, turning light resolution lower than default, and lower than default render settings (0.5 Render Quality, 85% Converged Ratio, max time and max samples just to eke out a bit more image quality). This may be a technique reserved for those with a beefier GPU (i.e. more CUDA cores than a 1660), as my testing shows it's faster at least on my system to just render everything at once, rather than waiting possibly 18 hours to make a single HDRI map, and then another 6+ hours to render another scene on top of that. Those 18-24 idle hours could be used composing a new scene, creating a new chara, etc. I'm not trying to knock this method, I truly believe it is beneficial and that it does work for people with more system resources, but in my own testing there's a low-point where you run into diminishing returns, rather than just brute-forcing an entire scene to render (even letting it fall over to CPU if necessary). Just some words from someone who's trying to reduce memory utilization as much as possible. Iray is a fickle mistress. I want to be a bit more clear, Daz Iray is a very complex beast WRT system configuration, so of course mileage may vary. I would just like to add this as extra information for those with lower CUDA core counts or are CPU-bound.
If you're only rendering one image, this method isn't quicker, its meant for people rendering multiple images from the same scene. A 1660 Ti is a decent GPU so I can only imagine that your scene is quite "busy" if it's taking you 7 hours to render a single spherical image.
@@GameDeveloperTraining Chalked it up to the Iray Water Caustic lights I was using. Once I turned that off, render times skyrocketed. Definitely a believer in this now!
To render one scene, render 3 more images and finally add it to the character and render again....Tho it takes a little bit of time to create the HDRI, Its worth a shot. Thankyou #Thundorn_Games
Hey man, excellent video, I followed your steps every way and it turned out really nicely I just have a couple questions I hope you can answer. The first is how long does your render normally take when you render these 3 images? It took 1 hr for the regular one, 20 minutes for the dark one and 2 hrs for the bright one for me, is that normal? To render the same environment (without the HDRI settings) it took me about an hour. And lastly, when I did get them rendered and merged into photoshop then back into daz using the environments in render settings for some reason the HDRI is not rotated correctly, I have to rotate the dome to get it properly aligned but then it looks unnatural, am I doing something wrong here? Thanks man, I appreciate the vids, I've watched loads of them, incredible information.
This technique is mostly useful when you are rendering multiple images from a single scene. The HDRI takes a while to set up, but once you have it made it will make all the subsequent renders a lot faster
If your photoshop sends to "Tone in ACR" for 32 bit and not allowing me to click "Ok" just go with it and click okay. When it comes out back to photoshop make sure to click 32 bits on the right hand side ad that will give you the radiance save option. FYI
Im just started learning daz a few days ago, what will you recommend to watch/learn for being able to create 2d sprites with background included? cuz i have no idea right now, i mean to make things like eye blinking in the scene, change characters expressions, for make a single change i have to render everything? thats kill me cuz it takes an ages for 1 render ;)
does anyone know why all daz renders end up always being so grainy and how to avoid that? thank! and thank you for the tip, will try it! such an innovative idea. would it work the same for animation or composting with footage ?
It would work for both assuming that you are keeping tight on the characters and not trying to do anything too dynamic. Grain is usually a result of not enough light. try increasing the brightness of the lights and compensating in tone mapping
Thundorn Games, thank you for the response! 🙏 hm it seems like the actual render has this pixelated quality to it, rather than light issue, because If I add more light it looks overexposed. I’ll try compensating with tone mapping again and lowering f stop even tho I want the soft depth of field look
The f-stop in the tone mapping doesn't affect Depth of field, only the f-stop in the camera settings do. Its one of those things that Daz Productions put in to emulate how a real camera works but didn't quite get it right. The only other suggestion I can give it to try manual oversampling. Render the image twice the size it needs to be and then when you shrink it to the correct size the noise will be reduced
have you checked the de-noiser filter( render tab) in Daz10.12. It gets rid of almost all the noise, but the downside is that the image isn't as crisp.
Hello, I'm wondering if changing the exposure in Photoshop would work the same way in comparison to changing it in DaZ and rendering the same image thrice.
Unfortunately not. Photoshop doesn't know which surfaces are light sources and which ones aren't. Something white in a render which isn't a light source would get dimmer in a render with exposure reduced but in photoshop it would get brighter
Wow! I have been trying to deal with this exact type of scenario where I want to animate a character and simply overlay her on a background. What I have been trying to do is to recreate similar lighting with other techniques for when I am just rendering the character. This will solve that whole issue perfectly. One thing though. Is the HDR creation facility that you are using from Photoshop available in any of the free Photoshop alternatives?
I believe you can still get versions of lightroom for free which has the ability to merge to HDR. I'm sure that the free alternatives to Photoshop such as GIMP would have a similar function
Okay, I've loaded in the HDR, but its just a black sphere when I go into iray mode? Edit: In case anyone else ran into this problem too, just make sure photoshop is in 32 bit mode and you actually save it as radiance. Just manually adding .hdr to your save doesn't mean it works.
Well, it helped a lot to create a dome and everything worked fine so far, BUT, now I have a giant dome that is wa to big to fit in any character or something else. My characters look like mitni toys compared to the surroundings from the dome. how can I fix that? o.o
Can the camera attributes be keyframed? I am asking because theoretically you could make a camera prop that you load in and just render the sequence if that was possible.
How long do the renders take you to complete? I have a Core i5 desktop, 16G of DDR4 RAM and a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, each render takes hours to complete! (I'm talking about the three scene renders that will form the HDRI background :) )
Hi, The number of iterations is different for every image and so it's not a metric that one can use to determine when an image is "done". It's up to you to decide when an it's time to stop the rendering process
I have a question - Essentially, I am currently using an old GTX970. I also have an old CPU (i56600K). Im going to be upgrading in the next few weeks. Which of these do you think is more important for rendering - or will make the most difference? Obv with a CPU upgrade, it will need the motherboard doing too, so can probably only afford the cpu/motherboard OR graphics card right now. Will do the other maybe next month,.
CPU motherboard first, then gpu after is what I would do. Gpu is good for render times but the cpu and motherboard will speed up Your overall workflow and make using Daz less painful.
Thundorn Games thanks for the swift reply. Just looking - the AMD CPU’s look far better value than intel. As I’m going for a new motherboard too, would you recommend them?
@@GoldenShredGaming i've always been intel so I don't know much about AMD. I know AMD are generally slightly cheaper for the same performance but that's something I can't advise on
I think thays because you had it set to 16b instead of 32b, or you didn't have the "finish in raw draw" or whatever that says unchecked in photoshop after merging the 3 images in HDR pro.
@@kamaleialpizar8055 oh yeah, I didn't notice the comment was 5 months ago, lol. Well good luck in the future, I ran into the same issue before, I just went back and checked if all of my setting were the same as his.
Hey folks. I get a lot of messages from people who don't get how this technique helps speed up render times. Please watch the whole video as I explain it at least twice, with the caveat that it wont work in every situation. I hope that helps :)
It's brilliant .....No wonder why daz take our money for a silly Hdr images - this is a lot easier and it definitely save a lot of rendering time.......!
Many million thanks
Wow... Really amazing idea. I never thought about doing it this way but it makes so much sense!!! It seems like it would work really well for those closeup shots with the blurred backgrounds from DOF. I have a coffee shop scene I'm working on now and I have a lot of shots to do of people talking to each other at a table and I think this would be perfect to speed up all those renders!
DreamLab Studio I’m glad if it helps. Tricks like this should speed up people’s workflow a lot so they can focus more time on writing and coding.
Fantastic tip, I'm working on a comic with some large complex interior scenes and this will massively speed up my workflow for all the parts where it just needs to be background whilst characters are speaking!
EDIT: FWIW this is easily do-able in GIMP for those who have been asking about alternatives to photoshop
Could you be kind enough to explain how to. I don't have photoshop. ^^
@@TenebrisInvictusI used a great tutorial titled "HDR Photos With the GIMP" on instructables dot com that taught me how to do it - just search for "hdr gimp instructables" and you should find it (not sure UA-cam likes direct linking to external sources in comments otherwise I'd post a direct link here)
@@itsarchie1261 Thank you so much for answering me so fast. I'll do just that. Have a nice day mate.
Dude! I love all your tutorials but, this one wow! This is sooooooooooooo amazing! Once one can grasp the potential of this technique and how many calculations are being avoided in the render. Plus I love the blurred background, it is more stylish and helps the eye to focus on the model in the first plane. Thank you very very much indeed!
Wow, thanks!
Brilliant making yourself an hdri to lesson the geometry calculations. I have a city scene that has way too much render time. This could help a tonne. Every video has great tips and tricks. Thanks.
Hey man i'm glad you are finding it useful. Thanks for the nice comments.
Great approach! Didn't know about "spherical" camera setting! Will try for sure. Thanks!
You're welcome!
Thank you! Going to try doing this also as I have an older Gtx 970 with only 4GB of ram so most large scenes run out of memory and try to use the cpu. Excited to use some of my Stonemason props lol 🙂
*Cries in 2GB Vram*
This is exactly what I have been looking for. Thanks.
I started using Daz studio recently, started as a photographer many years ago and now discovered that this software is awesome to create your own visions without finding the right place and model as you simply just create it.
After my first ok-ish results I found your channel and this helped me big time speeding up the learning curve. After watching this video, I ask myself how you would deal with artificial lighting in your scenery. Imagine you have an indoor scene, 4 artificial light sources which light a model. Would you create an HDR with all artificial lights and simply hide the model, or would you just use the background scenery with no lights and then insert model + artificial light sources in a second shot using the HDR as dome on top?
Keep up your amazing work, it is a pleasure to watch and follow! Thanks!!
One of my later videos explains how to use canvases to create impossible lighting in a scene. I also have a video about creating your own HDRi's for different lighting setups
@@GameDeveloperTraining Thanks so much, I will check them out. Your channel is really huge with lots of great content!
This is pretty amazing. I never considered these things and such. Ty
ur videos are really helpful. Thanks
Fascinating. I never knew that was possible, create an HDR with Daz and PS. Thanks.
You bet!
It's very helpful! Thanks!
Very useful tip, well explained.
Thanks, gonna try this later :) I usually drop the images into blender and render it again with the Intel denoiser, but now I can go a few sames higher I guess :D
Have fun!
Love the video, great tips! BTW did you make that lounge chair or if you purchased it where can we get it? Keep up the great work!
So ok, wow, thanks for the tip, awesome!
FUDGING AWESOME!!!!
Glad you like
good idea. How can you make the background clear though, as in not blurred. or is that not possible with hdri?
It’s possible but you would need to render your hdri images at 16k or higher to make them clearer.
@@GameDeveloperTraining will that still save time? compared to rendering it as whole? I just need decent clear1080p quality images with no issues like noise etc.
And just like you I need to churn out lots of renders
Rendering at that high a resolution will take a bit longer but it will still most likely save time in the long run
great tutorial thank you! :) just one question, is possible to use gimp or another free program instead of photoshop?
As far as I'm Aware yes.
@@GameDeveloperTraining ok thank you :D
Wow, great info, thanks! I see you have your environment value set pretty high - 7.0. Did you just play with it to get it right or was there a reason you used that value?
I just went with the value that worked at the time :)
I was hoping this would help out my poor little GTX 1660Ti, but the single spherical map I rendered took 6-7 hours at 1080p. I'm not sure because my log file keeps crashing, joy. This was also while using Scene Optimizer to reduce every single map size, using the Denoiser to try and speed up the render, turning light resolution lower than default, and lower than default render settings (0.5 Render Quality, 85% Converged Ratio, max time and max samples just to eke out a bit more image quality). This may be a technique reserved for those with a beefier GPU (i.e. more CUDA cores than a 1660), as my testing shows it's faster at least on my system to just render everything at once, rather than waiting possibly 18 hours to make a single HDRI map, and then another 6+ hours to render another scene on top of that. Those 18-24 idle hours could be used composing a new scene, creating a new chara, etc.
I'm not trying to knock this method, I truly believe it is beneficial and that it does work for people with more system resources, but in my own testing there's a low-point where you run into diminishing returns, rather than just brute-forcing an entire scene to render (even letting it fall over to CPU if necessary).
Just some words from someone who's trying to reduce memory utilization as much as possible. Iray is a fickle mistress.
I want to be a bit more clear, Daz Iray is a very complex beast WRT system configuration, so of course mileage may vary. I would just like to add this as extra information for those with lower CUDA core counts or are CPU-bound.
If you're only rendering one image, this method isn't quicker, its meant for people rendering multiple images from the same scene. A 1660 Ti is a decent GPU so I can only imagine that your scene is quite "busy" if it's taking you 7 hours to render a single spherical image.
@@GameDeveloperTraining Chalked it up to the Iray Water Caustic lights I was using. Once I turned that off, render times skyrocketed. Definitely a believer in this now!
@@Drew.DrivesYT Glad you got it sorted mate
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To render one scene, render 3 more images and finally add it to the character and render again....Tho it takes a little bit of time to create the HDRI, Its worth a shot. Thankyou #Thundorn_Games
but then you can reuse it
Very clever.
brilliant! most useful daz video
Glad it was helpful!
wow!!!
cool
Hey man, excellent video, I followed your steps every way and it turned out really nicely I just have a couple questions I hope you can answer.
The first is how long does your render normally take when you render these 3 images? It took 1 hr for the regular one, 20 minutes for the dark one and 2 hrs for the bright one for me, is that normal? To render the same environment (without the HDRI settings) it took me about an hour.
And lastly, when I did get them rendered and merged into photoshop then back into daz using the environments in render settings for some reason the HDRI is not rotated correctly, I have to rotate the dome to get it properly aligned but then it looks unnatural, am I doing something wrong here?
Thanks man, I appreciate the vids, I've watched loads of them, incredible information.
This technique is mostly useful when you are rendering multiple images from a single scene. The HDRI takes a while to set up, but once you have it made it will make all the subsequent renders a lot faster
If your photoshop sends to "Tone in ACR" for 32 bit and not allowing me to click "Ok" just go with it and click okay. When it comes out back to photoshop make sure to click 32 bits on the right hand side ad that will give you the radiance save option. FYI
Brilliant!
Im just started learning daz a few days ago, what will you recommend to watch/learn for being able to create 2d sprites with background included? cuz i have no idea right now, i mean to make things like eye blinking in the scene, change characters expressions, for make a single change i have to render everything? thats kill me cuz it takes an ages for 1 render ;)
ua-cam.com/video/g93G16F-JZQ/v-deo.html Follow this video. Save it as PNG and put your background in using an image editor like photoshop
Just... fckin... brilliant.
Awesome trick
does anyone know why all daz renders end up always being so grainy and how to avoid that? thank!
and thank you for the tip, will try it! such an innovative idea. would it work the same for animation or composting with footage ?
It would work for both assuming that you are keeping tight on the characters and not trying to do anything too dynamic. Grain is usually a result of not enough light. try increasing the brightness of the lights and compensating in tone mapping
Thundorn Games, thank you for the response! 🙏 hm it seems like the actual render has this pixelated quality to it, rather than light issue, because If I add more light it looks overexposed. I’ll try compensating with tone mapping again and lowering f stop even tho I want the soft depth of field look
The f-stop in the tone mapping doesn't affect Depth of field, only the f-stop in the camera settings do. Its one of those things that Daz Productions put in to emulate how a real camera works but didn't quite get it right. The only other suggestion I can give it to try manual oversampling. Render the image twice the size it needs to be and then when you shrink it to the correct size the noise will be reduced
have you checked the de-noiser filter( render tab) in Daz10.12. It gets rid of almost all the noise, but the downside is that the image isn't as crisp.
Gimp v2.10+ exports as .HDR format now and github still has the old Exposure-Blend script.
Interesting, though as you say, only certain circumstances, i.e. you won't get reflection and shadow from her into the HDRI.
Hello, I'm wondering if changing the exposure in Photoshop would work the same way in comparison to changing it in DaZ and rendering the same image thrice.
Unfortunately not. Photoshop doesn't know which surfaces are light sources and which ones aren't. Something white in a render which isn't a light source would get dimmer in a render with exposure reduced but in photoshop it would get brighter
@@GameDeveloperTraining Alright, thanks for the quick reply
Wow! I have been trying to deal with this exact type of scenario where I want to animate a character and simply overlay her on a background. What I have been trying to do is to recreate similar lighting with other techniques for when I am just rendering the character. This will solve that whole issue perfectly. One thing though. Is the HDR creation facility that you are using from Photoshop available in any of the free Photoshop alternatives?
I believe you can still get versions of lightroom for free which has the ability to merge to HDR. I'm sure that the free alternatives to Photoshop such as GIMP would have a similar function
Okay, I've loaded in the HDR, but its just a black sphere when I go into iray mode?
Edit: In case anyone else ran into this problem too, just make sure photoshop is in 32 bit mode and you actually save it as radiance. Just manually adding .hdr to your save doesn't mean it works.
Well, it helped a lot to create a dome and everything worked fine so far, BUT, now I have a giant dome that is wa to big to fit in any character or something else. My characters look like mitni toys compared to the surroundings from the dome. how can I fix that? o.o
Can the camera attributes be keyframed? I am asking because theoretically you could make a camera prop that you load in and just render the sequence if that was possible.
How long do the renders take you to complete? I have a Core i5 desktop, 16G of DDR4 RAM and a GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, each render takes hours to complete! (I'm talking about the three scene renders that will form the HDRI background :) )
That sounds like a scene optimisation issue. Either way this video still holds up, presuming your needs are as stated in this video.
YES
There's a trick there.... how do I optimize the scene props so when I render the 3 images for the HDRI they render fast?
how many iterations did you render each image. jpg, png?
Hi, The number of iterations is different for every image and so it's not a metric that one can use to determine when an image is "done". It's up to you to decide when an it's time to stop the rendering process
I have a question - Essentially, I am currently using an old GTX970. I also have an old CPU (i56600K). Im going to be upgrading in the next few weeks. Which of these do you think is more important for rendering - or will make the most difference? Obv with a CPU upgrade, it will need the motherboard doing too, so can probably only afford the cpu/motherboard OR graphics card right now. Will do the other maybe next month,.
CPU motherboard first, then gpu after is what I would do. Gpu is good for render times but the cpu and motherboard will speed up
Your overall workflow and make using Daz less painful.
Thundorn Games thanks for the swift reply. Just looking - the AMD CPU’s look far better value than intel. As I’m going for a new motherboard too, would you recommend them?
@@GoldenShredGaming i've always been intel so I don't know much about AMD. I know AMD are generally slightly cheaper for the same performance but that's something I can't advise on
@@GameDeveloperTraining No problem :D Thanks for all your replies and keep up the tutorials for both DAZ and Ren'py! Im actually learning stuff!
so wait a second..
this video is showing how u converted an entire scene to an environment map and the actual scene is no more on the scene tab?
Yes the scene becomes an IBL
but is this only usefull to render environment and interiori scene with less time?
It speeds up any render where characters are the main subject and are not interacting with the environment.
Can this be done in Gimp?
I'd imagine so. Any program that uses HDRI's as a background / light source could probably benefit from this method
Can't afford PS. Can someone provide instructions for GIMP 2.10?
👍
that busty characters' name is mom......? thats an um... strange name to give a character that looks like that that kinda name lol
Is it weird that it doesn’t say radiance on mines? Like At 7:50
Not sure what to suggest on that one. I'm using Photoshop CC and it's been there for me.
I think thays because you had it set to 16b instead of 32b, or you didn't have the "finish in raw draw" or whatever that says unchecked in photoshop after merging the 3 images in HDR pro.
@@honerablemention4550 I see. Probably, it has been so long since then lol. I actually never ended up making my HDRI Cuz of that
@@kamaleialpizar8055 oh yeah, I didn't notice the comment was 5 months ago, lol. Well good luck in the future, I ran into the same issue before, I just went back and checked if all of my setting were the same as his.
@@honerablemention4550 thank you for telling me.
amazing. Too bad I dont have PS
I imagine that the same could be achieved with other image editing software.
Спасиибо!